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A Wildlife Expert and Dr. Carson

by Rush Limbaugh - May 4,2015

RUSH: Jim in Tampa, you’re next. It’s great to have you. I’m glad you waited. I appreciate your patience. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, how you doing?

RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Yeah, I’m probably one of your few conservative tree hugger movie business followers, supporters. I’m a staunch conservative. I’ve been a wildlife rehabilitator for 15 years and was in the movie business for 15 years before that. I was calling specifically to —

RUSH: What is a wildlife rehabilitator?

CALLER: We rescue injured and orphaned wildlife and nurse it back to health until it can be rereleased.

RUSH: Like pelicans?

CALLER: Yeah, and you do it free. You have to make enough money doing a real job in order to contribute this to society. Nobody pays you to do it.

RUSH: Really?

CALLER: You have to be licensed by the state and the federal government to have the privilege to do it, but you gotta pay all the bills yourself.

RUSH: No kidding. I thought the state had people that did this. US Fish and Wildlife Service and all that?

CALLER: No, and some of the things you gotta do is pay for a $800-a-year rabies shot if you’re gonna handle carnivores like coyotes and wolves because of the —

RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

CALLER: No, it’s very expensive to do a favor for the community, but it’s rewarding.

RUSH: Well, hey, we love animals here. I think what you do is admirable.

CALLER: Well, what’s amazing to me, or fascinating, is I think true animal lovers, you know, so often we’re lumped into the tree hugger, you know, crazy, you know, global warming group.

RUSH: No, no, no, no. That’s the PETA crowd.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: They want to place animals on a level equal or above humanity. You’re not that.


CALLER: Right. And one of the things I’ve learned watching animals is how much they reflect society. I mean, we can learn so much from them. Their political world, there are so many similarities with the human world that it’s almost hilarious.

RUSH: Well, what have you learned and from which animal?

CALLER: Well, I’ll just give you a couple of quick examples. Here’s a negative animal. A cowbird lays more eggs than any other bird. They lay like 77 eggs a year. Most birds, 90% of all birds mate for life, so if your mate dies you don’t mate anymore. It’s a lifetime commitment. The cowbird does not. The partnering bird provides no support. Most birds, while the female is on the nest —

RUSH: Let me guess, the partnering bird is a male.

CALLER: Yes, correct.

RUSH: Provides no support.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: And so what the cowbird has to do, since it has no support while it’s sitting on a nest, is it lays its nest in another bird’s nest and lets that bird take care of its offspring, very often at the cost of life to those other birds. Because the cowbird hatches faster, grows bigger, eats more, and very often this hosting bird loses its own offspring because it’s raising the cowbird offspring.

RUSH: Right. And what have you learned about humanity from that?

CALLER: Well, I see it paralleling, you know, the same situations that the birds that reproduce the fastest and get the support do so at the expense of the hardworking birds that take care of each other.

RUSH: Yeah, I see that.

CALLER: You see similar things with the riots. You can take a pack of totally domestic, wonderful, loving dogs, and if you put one crazy dog in there, that entire pack can turn vicious and killer. It just takes one aggressive animal to trigger this vicious attack within the entire pack. One of the things that you were talking about a minute ago that I had to chuckle about, if you have a city that’s run by a party for a long time and they have riots, they ought to be disqualified from the solution.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And wolves actually do that. We had a pack of wolves that we raised. I say we, my wife and I worked together, she’s a veterinarian technician. So we did this as a joint effort. But the wolves, when I was learning how to care for them, we ended up with them kind of unexpectedly so it was a learning process of when they first come you’re scared to death you’re gonna be eaten by them. But as you watch the way they run their own society, you realize they’re totally self-sufficient and they take care of themselves. But there’s an alpha male and an alpha female that set the rules and discipline and enforce the pack, the entire pack.

RUSH: Were you able to domesticate any of them?

CALLER: In the case of the wolves, half of them were tame. You could go in the enclosure with them, the tame ones would come up and visit. The wild ones would disappear. They wanted nothing to do with you. I mean, there’s only a few cases in the history of the United States where a wolf has ever killed a human.

RUSH: Sounds like women.

CALLER: Despite the Hollywood thing, they’re pretty much self-centered.

RUSH: Yeah, Hollywood devastates wolves. Every movie about wolves, they are just rampant. One of them killed Liam Neeson in a movie.

CALLER: Oh, I know, it’s hilarious. I can tell you in the last 200 years there’s like six cases of a wolf ever killing a person and it’s usually either a rabid animal or an extreme remote —

RUSH: I knew a guy, one of the radio consultants in Sacramento had a pet wolf, called him Jack. He had a cabin out in the woods near I think it was Reno, and he had a wolf that lived in the house with him. He made it sound like it was a pet within certain limits. It wasn’t totally, but he was never afraid of it.

CALLER: We had one that was the lowest ranking wolf that we called the “house wolf.” She was so timid. We raised her with the dogs and she became part of the household. Used to travel with me. She actually — I mean, one of the things about animals is if they’re not in need of food and survival, they’re basically for the most part friendly to other species. I mean, this wolf helped us raise dozens of fawns. She would nurse the fawn, clean it, protect it, provide all the services that the mother did, because she was well fed. She didn’t need to eat it, so the hostility largely disappears.

RUSH: I tell you, this stuff all fascinates me. I don’t mean to sound silly here, but I’ve had a bunch of cats, and, you know, you feed them, you put the food in their bowl, the bowl is on the floor, and after they eat what they want they start covering it. They think they’re covering it. They start pawing the ground. They’re not covering anything and nobody’s gonna steal their food. What is that? It’s not instinct.

CALLER: Animals, you’ve got the ones that have the cognitive ability, the ability to think ahead and to plan. The covering, they may be trying to hide it to save for later. A lot of animals will bury food and then come back to it.

RUSH: Right. Oh, I know that’s what she’s doing, but nobody’s gonna take her food, and she’s not covering it. Can she not see that?

CALLER: We had a funny thing with the wolf that lived with the dogs, because supposedly wolves are much smarter than dogs. So we watched this wolf to try to look for signs of differences of intelligence. Besides the fact she could open doors, windows, you know, door latches, I mean, any kind of door she could open. When we fed the dogs — we had 12 at the time — we put 12 dishes of food down. We usually mixed a little canned food in it, and we’d set the empty can out in the middle of the room so whichever animal was finished first, it would go lick out the can and not bother the other animals who were eating.

And for many, many weeks the hound dog would gobble her food without chewing, run over and grab the can and that was it. The hound dog always got it ’cause she just ate the fastest. Well, one day the wolf left her full dish of food and went over to the empty can, and I’m thinking, “That’s not very smart. You’re supposed to be smarter than the dogs, you’re leaving a full dish to get the empty can.” She picked up the can, brought it back to her dish, set it in the middle of the dish, ate her dinner, then licked the can out after her dinner was done.

RUSH: Wow, that’s brilliant.

CALLER: And she did that forever after. None of the other dogs ever figured out they could do the same thing. (laughing)

RUSH: You just angered after the audience who think the dog is smarter than their spouse.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Now, look, Jim, hang on, I have to take a break. Jim actually called about Dr. Benjamin Carson.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: So let’s get to that, Jim, when we get back to you after the break here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Back to the phones we go, and it’s Jim in Tampa, who actually called about Dr. Benjamin Carson. What is it about Dr. Carson you wanted to say?

CALLER: Well, I saw his announcement this morning and was extremely impressed. I really knew nothing about him. But one of the things he mentioned, is he wanted to dispel the rumor that goes with so many Republicans that they’re out to eliminate what he called the safety net in the form of welfare and supports. What he wanted to eliminate… He said, “I don’t want to eliminate safety nets for people who need them. I want to eliminate dependence of able-bodied people that can work,” and that’s what got me thinking about the wildlife tie-in.

Animals are the same way. We get so many calls as wildfire rehabilitators to relocate problem animals, and so many times it was because people were feeding them, and then the animals become not only dependent, but demanding. We had one story where a lady called and asked if we relocated raccoons. And I said, “Yeah. When you say ‘raccoons,’ are you talking a couple?”

She said, “Twelve,” and long story short, I asked her, “Have you been feeding them?” and she said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, you need to stop feeding them and they will stop bothering you.” She said, “Well, we tried that, but around one in the morning they get rocks and bang on the window. We feed ’em so we can get to sleep.” I said, “Well, you’ve now trained those animals that if they bang on the windows, they’ll get fed.”

RUSH: See, I remember stories of small businesses off the coast of North Carolina that would take people out and basically say, “We’re gonna show you some wildlife in the sea,” and the way they had done it, is they had begun to feed various fish, and the fish came to expect it at the right place. These entrepreneurs just had to take the boats and people out. The people would pay for the food as part of the admission price, and then these fish would come out.

Whatever kind of exotic fish that these people had found, they’d watch and be fed, and it was clear they had become dependent, which in the wildfire sector, is a disservice. They have to be able to provide for themselves or they’re toast, as you well know. But it’s interesting. Of all the things that caught your attention, even though it relates to your work, it was Dr. Carson’s commenting on welfare. I have the sound bite. I’m gonna play the sound bite here, but there’s a lot to be said about this.

I find it… It’s gonna be a little tricky because I don’t want to sound at all like I’m critical of Dr. Carson, ’cause I am not. My only point is he’s not the first to point this out. Now, he may be the first you have heard say it in a way that relates to your business so that you understood it and knew that he was right and so forth. But the intellectual, the societal, the economic arguments against welfare have been made for decades, and they’re all right on the money.

Yet the number of people on welfare continues to expand. The number of people on welfare wanting to be on welfare expands, even though everybody knows it’s a dead-end street. I think largely this is because there’s a political party that has decided to profit from it, and that’s not compassion. A political party profiting from keeping people poor and dependent is not a party that needs to be rewarded by winning elections.

Here’s what Dr. Carson said. He was in Detroit today, his hometown. He announced that he is running for president. We’ve actually got four sound bites. We’ll have time for this one on welfare.

CARSON: There are many people who are critical of me because they say, “Carson wants to get rid of all the safety nets and welfare programs, even though he must have benefited from them.” This is a blatant lie. I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

CARSON: And we’re not doing people a favor when we pat them on the head and say, “There, there, you poor little thing. We’re gonna take care of all your needs. You don’t have to worry about anything.” You know who else says stuff like that? (pause) Socialists.

RUSH: He’s exactly right, and what he said here is known and is understood by all kinds of zillions of people. But you notice the way they go after him? “Well, who are you? You know, you want to get rid of all safety nets and welfare programs, even though you must have benefited from them.” That’s the same thing they did to Clarence Thomas in reverse. They accused him of wanting to get rid of affirmative action, even though he benefited from it, to which he replied that he did not.

But anyway, I have to take a break because of time.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You want a provocative statement? Try this: “Welfare has done more harm to the black community than police brutality ever has.” Yeah, yeah. Think about it before you automatically knee-jerk reject it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I got e-mail from some people asking about something that our wildfire caller mentioned. He quoted me as saying, “When something hasn’t worked for 50 years, try something new.” I was quoting Obama. It was Obama, when explaining why he was working with the Iranians to get a nuclear weapon or why he’s doing foreign policy the way he’s doing it on anything else. It was Obama who said, “When you’re doing hasn’t worked for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

I simply said, “Okay. Well, then, let’s have a new rule that says any city that experiences riots and economic tumult and distress — any city that experiences riots and economic collapse — that has been predominantly governed by a single political party, then that party should be disqualified from participating in any solutions,” under Obama’s theory that when what you’re doing hasn’t worked for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.


Well, the liberals have been running Baltimore for decades. Liberal Democrats have been running Baltimore for decades. Ditto, Detroit. Ditto any number of cities. They should not be part of the solution. What they’re doing isn’t working! Time to try something new. (whispers) “Capitalism.” I was just making a point. I just taking the guidance offered by our president, Barack Hussein O.

I have other sound bites from Dr. Carson here, who did announce his candidacy today for the presidency. He did so in Detroit. Remember, he’s the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital which is in — dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut — Baltimore. We have three bites. Here you go with the first one.

CARSON: One of the rules in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is you make the majority believe that what they believe is no longer relevant, and no intelligent person thinks that way. And the way you believe is the only way intelligent people believe. And that way, they’ll keep silent. Because I’ll tell you something: They don’t care if you don’t believe what they believe, as long as you keep your mouth shut, and that’s what we have to start doing. We have to start opening our mouths.

RUSH: He’s exactly right. He’s talking about push-back. He’s talking about actually opposing some of this stuff rather than acquiescing to it, which is what the Republican Party establishment (for the most part) in Washington has done. Here’s the next one…

CARSON: This country was envisioned by individuals who wanted everything to be surrounding the people. “Of, for, and by the people.” Not “of, for, and by the” government. And the government was to respond to the will of the people, not the people to the will of the government. We’ve allowed the whole thing to be under upside-down. We’ve gone far beyond what our Constitution describes, and we’ve begun to just allow it to expand based upon what the political class wants, because they like to increase their power and their dominion over the people. And I think it’s time for the people to rise up and take the government back.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: And the final bite…

CARSON: We’ve allowed the purveyors of division to become rampant in our society and to create friction and fear in our society. People are afraid to stand up for what they believe in, because they don’t want to be called a name. They don’t want an IRS audit. They don’t want their jobs messed with or their families messed with. But isn’t it time for us to think about the people who came before us, and what they were willing to do so that we could be free? Nathan Hale, a teenage rebel caught by the British ready to be executed! He said, “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country.”

RUSH: You know, what is remarkable about this and what is great about it is he boils this down to its simplistic eloquence. The founding of this country, how it was envisioned, what it used to be, what it has become. I hope it’s effective. You know, I think it will be with certain groups of people. We’ve all sought ways, every one of us… I know you have. We’ve all sought ways to make gains or inroads with what is called the low-information voter. We’ve all tried to find out how to reach these people.

So we make the assumption that the low-information voter buys into big government, buys into Democrat Party, buys in and supports all of this expansion, for whatever reason. They think it’s compassionate. They think it’s helpful to people, or what have you. In fact, it’s destructive. Dr. Carson has one of the most basic and elementary techniques for explaining this. I mean, this would suffice as a civics class for people learning it for the first time, and it may be that’s what’s called for with certain people in the low-information crowd.

The exposure he gets, it could enlighten who knows how many millions of people, because he clearly says this — all of these things — in a way that is not hard to understand, and it’s not confrontational or provocative or controversial. Of course, until the left and the media get hold of it and get hold of him and start trying to distort his words and his purpose, which they have already done and will continue to do.


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